Dirty secrets in the national interest

A third of the nation faces acute shortages of water; elsewhere pockets of devastating floods inflict other damages. These are unfortunate, but unavoidable; nearly every regional climate experiences degrees of variability, providing abundant blessing in some years and woeful suffering in others. With some inter-state cooperation and sensible planning at the national level, however, these should be manageable. Droughts and floods have both occurred since anyone can remember. Surely, an array of meteorologists and their satellites, along with economists and their planning, can be brought to bear upon the management of short-term fluctuations in climate.

With this optimistic understanding of climate change, let us turn to the evidence. Two months after predictions of a 'normal' monsoon, the reports from the far corners of the nation are damning. According to the India Meteorological Department's mid-season monsoon review, the country received 30 per cent less rainfall than the predicted normal. Twenty one of the 36 meteorological divisions in the nation received 'deficient' rains, i e 20 per cent to 60 per cent below normal, and a further 5 divisions received even less. The northwest is particularly affected, with the entire region receiving less than half the norm.

Why did the predictions of "normal" monsoon go so awry? A combination of state policy and ineptitude is to blame.

The national forecasts are compiled by examination of early warning signals in climate from several regions of the world. For instance, one driving force behind the monsoons is the difference in surface temperatures between the Indian Ocean and the Tibetan-Central Asian plateau. Warm air rising over the land masses permits cooler air from the oceans to take its place. The greater the difference between land and ocean temperatures, the greater the force with which this cycle occurs. Therefore, measurements of surface temperatures in March and April over both the Indian Ocean and Tibet should allow us to estimate how good the summer monsoon will be.

There are other indicators, and several of these must be similarly monitored. Because global weather is so interlocked, changes in regions as far away as the mid-Pacific can create noticeable differences in the climate over India. The land-ocean temperature gradient is but one of many such driving forces; by most accounts there are 16 such measures that the IMD takes into account. I say "by most accounts" because the government, in its wisdom, simply refuses to disclose them. The procedures by which a prediction of "normal" [or good/bad] monsoon is made are not available for outside scientific scrutiny.

There is an obvious downside to this. Since the IMD isn't really challenged on the scientific basis for its forecasts, one must take the actual climate that follows, and use that to judge the department. The grade for this year: F.

Why the secrecy? Wouldn't more public assessments of the techniques produce revisions in the model on an ongoing basis, and thereby permit better economic planning? Yes and no, as it turns out. Yes, better information and greater scrutiny by a broader community of scientists, farmers and other interested persons will clearly help. No, because the planning that results from such public knowledge cannot be controlled by the government for its political purposes. Predictably, the administration insists that it does not lend its own twist to forecasts, but in that case it hasn't explained satisfactorily why the predictions are run past political eyes first.

The game here is allegedly protecting the secrecy of information in the national interest. The argument made for this isn't devious, but it's certainly simplistic. Because the monsoon is hugely vital to the agriculture-dominated Indian economy, information pertaining to it must be managed in the national interest. Therefore, forecasting the Indian monsoon, the government believes, ought to be its sole preserve. For similar reasons, the volumes of data collected by the Indian Space Research Organisation must first be vetted by administrators. This apparently innocuous reasoning leads inevitably to eventual disaster.

The fears are ingenuous, for one. It defies every sense of an open society to hold such knowledge hostage. The top-down freedoms granted to the Indian people have always smacked of condescension, first from the reluctant colonial masters and thereafter from our own governments. Political leaders take it upon themselves to determine which of our freedoms may be exercised sensibly, and which others are potentially harmful. Under this misguided notion, for example, ordinary citizens were prohibited from flying the national flag over their homes and offices, because the leaders determined that dignified use of the flag was the sole preserve of government!

Second, the purpose of planning is preparedness, and this is woefully lacking. In Europe and in the United States, industries of every sort become more competitive by using climate forecasts and accounting for potential economic risks and benefits. In contrast, Indian forecasting is designed to provide absolutely no economic security. It is well known that IMD's forecasting models can only reliably predict normal or near-normal conditions; they will fail whenever the nation's rainfall greatly exceeds or falls below the average. Genuinely useful information that would prepare us for disasters, it turns out, is the real secret -- no one knows the danger until it is well upon us.

Third, the secrecy is easily defeated, by and large. The driving forces are global, not local to India or regional to South Asia. Any reasonable assessment of the coming monsoon over India must include several observations made elsewhere -- temperatures off the coast of Indonesia, moisture over the Maldives, and so on. That information is available to researchers everywhere. Foreign satellite programs, such as the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and other non-Indian efforts permit extensive observations of tropical and subtropical changes to be gathered routinely, including over India. And serious research on the monsoon continues to be published and discussed outside India.

The secret, it turns out, is unworthy of concealment, and in any event is easily discovered. We ourselves obtain neither the security of the protected knowledge nor the ability for planning and preparedness that should follow from it.

The shallow reasoning behind official secrecy in especially inexcusable in a country where hundreds of millions of the rural poor live subsistence lives. Inevitably, many farmers will lose their livelihood from this summer's absence of rain. With rural incomes already under strain from the thoughtless trade agreements of recent years, the additional burden resulting from unforeseen climate overwhelms huge swaths of our population. Their usual recourse is to become ever more indebted to the caste and class hierarchies of their environment, and significantly, to the financial institutions -- including government-owned banks -- that control their destiny.

Here, another ugly side of State secrecy is evident. The banks are among the largest likely money-spinners to the government, should they be eventually divested. The push towards making them attractive to private bankers, though, is held up by their large holdings of non-performing assets, much of which is political patronage masquerading as discretionary lending. Feeling the pressure to recover some portion of these loans, the banks have begun foreclosing on the borrowers and auctioning off their assets. Except, rather than recover the wrongful gains of those who benefited hugely from past largesse, the banks have sought to vaporise the meagre holdings -- including personal jewelry and cattle -- of small borrowers.

The little people face violent separation from their property, and must find their own way in a society without a meaningful welfare net. The largest debtors in the land, however, remain unfettered by these moves. Wouldn't you like to know who received the hundreds of billions that the nationalised banks have written off over the years? But no! For them, there is the legal protection of official secrecy. Their identities and the amounts outstanding from them, we are told solemnly, if widely known would put the nation at grave economic risk! Consequently, the wine-sipping classes whose true worth lies in the negative billions embark on even further misadventures in the capital markets, whereas the honest farmer who's had a poor turn of luck -- and along with it some terrible agricultural policy and plain wrong forecasts from his government -- is thrown to the wolves.

Shame.

Secrecy in the national interest is understandable -- most people will grant the government some leeway in protecting information that serves a compelling interest. The mask of secrecy that maintains the nexus between politics and business, however, serves only a criminal interest. Our business leaders, it turns out, aren't that savvy, no matter that glowing tributes to their prosperity appear routinely on our business pages. With a few million bucks each month in uncollected loans, any fool could build an empire; indeed many appear to have done just that.

The drought is a wrenching catastrophe in the lives of the poor, who will bear its fiercest brunt. More than that, though, it should be a reminder even to those fortunate enough to escape its wrath. Government approval of fraud to facilitate private profit is nothing new, it only remains for those who strut their 'leadership' to be exposed as the thieves they really are. Right-to-Information bills passed in Parliament and a few states are beginning to challenge the cloak that hides so much profiteering. Diligent efforts from the citizenry to cast aside the structures that lead to these disasters are an absolute must. This isn't impossible; Janaagraha's campaign to open Bangalore's budget to public scrutiny is a fine example -- citizen involvement matters, and can eventually bring about positive change.

This summer, though, the great drought of ideas and character continues in the halls of power.

Ashwin Mahesh